What we often miss is the longer-term effect of trade, as the increased competition spurs faster technological progress. It isn’t just more companies making cell phones, competition causes the companies – domestic and foreign – to create better phones faster. That’s why many poor Americans today can afford phones far superior to those only the rich could afford 10 years ago.

Although the American government has not yet reached the scope of collectivist central planning that F. A. Hayek targeted in The Road to Serfdom, much of what he writes there is applicable to it, mutatis mutandis. I specifically have in mind his famous chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” the central point of which is that the more detailed the plan the State seeks to impose on its citizens, the more ruthless and expedient its executioners must be if it is to succeed. This is why the most ruthless and unprincipled have the advantage in the struggle for political power. What separates President Obama, or any other recent American president, from someone like President Vladimir Putin of Russia is a matter of degree, not of kind. To paraphrase Lord Acton, not only does power tend to corrupt, but absolute power tends to attract the absolutely corrupt. Frank Underwood, the protagonist of the television drama House of Cards, is an excellent, though of course fictional, illustration of exactly that tendency.

Politics is inseparable from government, indeed it is government, and the bigger the government, the bigger the role of politics.